The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Work of the inventors hereof, to the extent the work is described in this background section, as well as aspects of the description that does not otherwise qualify as prior art at the time of filing, are neither expressly nor impliedly admitted to be prior art against the present disclosure.
Data frames transmitted in an 802.11 network usually has a significant amount of overhead, including radio level headers, Media Access Control (MAC) frame fields, interframe spacing information, acknowledgement information of transmitted frames, and/or the like. The transmission of the overhead information sometimes consumes a significant portion of the channel bandwidth, and thus reduces transmission efficiency of the payload data. MAC service data unit (MSDU) aggregation is thus used to group several data frames into one large frame for transmission, i.e., an A-MSDU, such that the several grouped data frames can share management information in the overhead for the large frame. In this way, the ratio of payload data to the total volume of data transmitted is improved, allowing higher throughput.
An MSDU, however, often has a limited size. For example, in 802.11ad, the maximum MSDU size is 7920 bytes. When an application generates a large datagram, e.g., sometimes can be much larger than 7920 bytes, the datagram is usually required to be segmented in order to fit into an MSDU to be transmitted over an 802.11ad link. However, significant computational overhead may be inflicted to the host processor when the host processor segments the large datagram on the application layer.